Vietnam aims to achieve full coverage of health insurance in 2015. An increasing type of health insurance in Vietnam is voluntary health insurance. Although there are many studies on the implementation of voluntary health insurance in Vietnam, little is known on the causal impact of voluntary health insurance. This paper measures the impact of voluntary health insurance on health care utilizati...

Childhood obesity is a recognized public health crisis. This paper reviews the lessons learned from a voluntary initiative to expand insurance coverage for childhood obesity prevention and treatment services in the United States. In-depth telephone interviews were conducted with key informants from 16 participating health plans and employers in 2010-11. Key informants reported difficulty ensuri...

The voluntary sector has long been seen as the foundation of a healthy civil society (DeTocqueville, 1961; Leonard & Onyx, 2003). Yet, substantial growth in the last two decades in demand for voluntary sector services in Canada has been accompanied by a significant reduction in government resources supporting the sector’s activities (Browne, 1996). This confluence of sector growth and decreased...

Current cloud services are deployed on wellprovisioned and centrally controlled infrastructures. However, there are several classes of services for which the current cloud model may not fit well: some do not need strong performance guarantees, the pricing may be too expensive for some, and some may be constrained by the data movement costs to the cloud. To satisfy the requirements of such servi...

varieties of Voluntary Hospitals : General Hospitals, Special Hospitals and Cottage Hospitals, so-called. In the past, the medical staff of a Voluntary Hospital has given its services either entirely gratuitously or, in a few instances, each member of the staff has received a small honorarium for out-of-pocket expenses. It has always been understood, however, by the honorary medical staff of a ...

This paper studies how congestion in the public health sector can be used as a redistributive tool. In our model, agents differ in income and they can obtain a health service either from a congested public hospital or from a non congested private one at a higher price. With pure in-kind redistribution, agents fail to internalize their impact on congestion, and the demand for the public hospital...

ECOSEL is a voluntary market framework for private provision of forest ecosystem services. Multiobjective optimization is used in conjunction with a unique funding mechanism to generate and market forest management alternatives that are projected to lead to efficient bundles of ecosystem services on a piece of forestland. ECOSEL allows the public to bid on the competing alternatives. Whichever ...

In their path of searching for additional sources information better-informed decision-making process, market participants are presented with Voluntary disclosures. This paper aims at examining the determinants voluntary disclosures in GCC countries. A cross-sectional multiple regression analysis a sample size 74 listed firms from equity markets shows that leverage and economic sectors dominate...

OBJECTIVE This paper aims to explore the options available for developing community-based care and improving the quality of care in psychiatric hospitals in Ghana. METHOD Semi-structured interviews (SSIs) and focus group discussions (FGDs) were conducted: with a cross-section of stakeholders including health professionals, researchers, policy makers, politicians, users and carers. The SSIs an...

BACKGROUND Malaria accounts for about 60% of all clinic attendance in Nigeria. About 300,000 children die of malaria annually while an estimated 4,500 pregnant women are lost annually on account of malaria in Nigeria alone. High cost of treatment is a barrier to the uptake of health services in low resource settings, therefore an exploration of the cost of malaria management will reveal possibl...